Nightbeast

It's dark, beady, soulless eyes stun you with fear. You feel it's hot breath emanating from behind it's great, toothy maw. It plunges its claws into your stomach, tearing away flesh, unraveling your intestines as your life slowly drifts away from you. Or maybe it trains it laser gun right between your eyes and pulls the trigger. Sending your atoms careening into oblivion, vaporizing you. No matter how it dispatches you, one thing is for certain, this is... the Nightbeast!


It's ship destroyed after it crash landed on Earth, the Nightbeast! must now feed on human flesh and kill everything.... because it is Nightbeast! Really though, the movie never explains just why the creature takes to maiming, mauling, vaporizing, or blasting whoever it comes across. It's an evil looking alien, so obviously it's gonna do evil things. And the movie wouldn't really benefit from any expositions on the things motivations because I'm watching a cheesy 80s B-movie. I'm not here for story, I'm here for a few things: gore, creatures, and possibly boobies. Well, there's a creature, some decent gore, but not much of the third

After the creatures initial slaughter of some campers, a creepy uncle taking his nephews out into the woods at night.... and a couple of randy teens, the local police finally square off against.... the Nightbeast! Lasers flying everywhere, causing explosions that look like slightly angry sparklers! Close ups of gun shots! Police disintegrating into black ash. It's a war zone. The outcome? Nightbeast!: 1 - Sheriff Jack Cinder: 0.

 As daylight approaches, Jack decides to evacuate the town. Most people get out, but then there is the Mayor who is to busy planning a party for the Governor, his secretary Mary Jane, and Drago, the asshole biker who from the second you lay eyes on him you want Nightbeast! to tear his face off and force feed it to him.

Turns out that the doctors hanging behind are the true heroes around here, managing to fight off the creature after it severs one patients arm, then slashes and tosses the other two aside, leaving them to bleed out slowly. The doctors escape into the basement of their home, but that only lasts for so long as Nightbeast! smashes in the door and stalks down into the basement. Cornered, they have to do some quick thinking... bullets don't harm it... how about electricity! Yanking the power chord out of their washer, the doctor throws buckets of water on the ground. Closer and closer the Nightbeast! nears. Another step, another step, one more... NOW! Nightbeast! staggers and smokes, finding some strength it retreats.

 

The movie struggles to have any tense moments because from the very beginning of the movie there is always something happening. Nightbeast! is always tearing someone up, blasting things with its gun, or to break of the monotony of it all, Drago is busy being a prick, strangling women and being a rapist. Then there is the comedy gold of Mary Jane and Mayor "Don't Call me Burty" Burt and their drunken shenanigans. The scenes with them are great, cementing with you that the people that made this movie knew they were making some cheesy, fun stuff. They also happen to provide the most tense part of the movie, when Mary Jane drunkenly makes her way through the dark house ultimately ending in her demise.

With everyone else dead, Drago gut shot for trying to rape the deputy, and nothing else to lose, the Sheriff, his deputies, and the doctors make their last stand. Thanks to the smarts of the doctors, they know that Nightbeast! doesn't take to electricity very well. Now they just need a coil and time to set up. Let me just say that the end is... electrifying...

So Nightbeast, was it good? Not really. Was it bad? Nah, it's a B-movie, it's not meant to be very good. In the end, it was just alright. It could drag on here and there, and the shootout scenes were a little lengthy, but if you're in the mood for a funky little horror movie, this will do alright. Make a night of it and scream "Nightbeast!" every time its on screen or they do a close up of its toothy grin.

So kick back, turn off your brain and have fun as this horrible creature in a silver jumpsuit rips and shreds and zaps everything in this small country town.